For my main imaging camera I decided to stop trying to use a DSLR and switch to a specialist imaging camera for Deep Sky astro photography.   I chose to go for the ZWO ASI-1600MM-Pro camera.

Whilst this is a mono camera, I’m intending capturing colour images by using a filter wheel and LRGB filters. Which I already own.

The main reason that I wanted to go for one of these is that it’s a Cooled camera.  The cooling unit is much better than the one that I made last year.  In fact, I’ve already had this camera image at -20°C.   Doing this means that I can get much less noise from the camera due to heat.  Also it means that I can take Dark, Flat and bias frames knowing what the temperature of the camera is which makes them work better.

Having a USB Hub built in means that I can run the filter wheel using a cable from the camera.  This helps to keep the cable jumble down, fewer cables means less to get cause and cause problems.

This setup also means that I can take darks flats and bias frames during the day which is a boon for making the most of those precious nights.

This image is one hours worth of luminance, taken with the camera on it’s default settings (gain 50 and offset 0) as I didn’t know about the settings at the time.

Just for fun I ran the image against astrometry.net and here’s the result

http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/2734789#original

Next time I’m out with the camera, I’ll be using Gain 139 which is known as Unity gain and an offset of 25.   I don’t know what the offset does, but it’s a starting point that I can adjust settings from.